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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28349604">Living In Twilight</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifyouwereamelody/pseuds/ifyouwereamelody'>ifyouwereamelody</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dom/sub, Dominant Katara (Avatar), Dominant Zuko (Avatar), Domtara, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Forbidden Love, I really have no idea where this is going, Opposites Attract, Smut, Switching</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:42:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,087</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28349604</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifyouwereamelody/pseuds/ifyouwereamelody</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He was never meant to want her. And she was never meant to find him. Not after their first fateful encounter, that ill-met collision of day and night.</p><p>But where the sun goes, the moon will always follow.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Katara &amp; Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>52</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. I</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This started out as a skeleton concept for day 1 of Zutara Drabble December, and now it has turned into a skeleton concept for a multi-chap story. I have almost no clue where it's going right now, so to that end just be aware that I have chosen not to use any archive warnings because... I don't know what's going to happen yet? I will change appropriately if anything ends up cropping up (the ones I could imagine possibly coming up at some point are violence and major character death, but those are by no means confirmed). </p><p>Since I'm writing this slapdash, it probably also means that chapter lengths are gonna vary quite a lot. Just a heads up.</p><p>Basically, we're all in for a good ol' highly-improvised ride with this one.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He is a son of daylight; that’s the certainty with which he’s been raised. Zuko is firstborn to a family blessed by Agni, a boy shaped from fire and sun, his veins brimming with liquid gold to make him somehow <em>above</em>, somehow <em>more</em> than those who aren’t so fortunate. To rule — to shine bright and blinding across the land, to stand proud whilst the masses exalt and cower before him — is his birthright.</p><p>Those who slink around in the twilight are to be scorned and sneered at. Or, when he’s feeling generous, pitied. They are weak and mean, cold-blooded from the chill pallor of the moon’s feeble attempt at light, and they make no effort to lift themselves out of the murky darkness in which they dwell.</p><p>They are nothing compared to him, he’s told. And he believes it. Every moment from sunrise to sundown, he holds the conviction molten and glowing in the space at the base of his breastbone, and it’s easy enough to keep the fire burning in the dry warmth of the day.</p><p>When night falls, though, that’s when Katara comes to him.</p><p>He was never meant to want her. And she was never meant to find him. Not after their first fateful encounter just a few weeks ago, that ill-met collision of day and night as he found himself caught outside the city walls at dusk. She saved him from the prowling of her brethren, showed him the secret gap that she used as passage to the city and its spoils, but that should’ve been the last of it; the quickening of his pulse and prickling of his skin should’ve been labelled as fear and promptly forgotten, and she should’ve pretended that she didn’t care where he went once he left her sight, and there should’ve been no more story to tell.</p><p>But where the sun goes, the moon will always follow.</p><p>Every night, without fail, she appears. A solid, silver apparition of the small hours, she slips in through his window on a beam of moonlight, steals into his bed, and passes the inky depths of night making him her own.</p><p>She’s ruthless, this woman who spends her life swimming in shadows, utterly unforgiving as she brands him with her breath, guides his fingers into the slickened heat between her legs, stirs him senseless with the press and curl of her hips. Night after night, Katara uses him to draw whatever pleasure she wishes from herself and wrings him ragged in the process — icy blue eyes meet his, flutter closed as she finds her satiety hot and glistening against him, and the flame of Zuko’s sun-fuelled belief gutters, flickers, dies.</p><p>But even as she pulls away, as she leaves him on whisper-soft footsteps, no chill finds its way into the space that she’s left behind; he is scorching, ablaze in a way that he only ever feels by her touch. And he wonders, as he does every night before the morning breaks, how the garish light of day could ever possibly compare.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. II</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is probably the slowest 2500 words I've ever written? It was a *bizarre* struggle to get out despite having a really clear concept for the power dynamics at play, and I have no idea why, but here we go.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She doesn’t know why tonight is different.</p><p>It <em>shouldn’t</em> be different.</p><p>The moon is high and bright, waxing amongst the stars as Katara scales the palace wall and slips in through the Sun Prince’s window. This is a moon that she knows, for all its variability, one whose light courses through her as easily as the blood in her veins; ever-moving, ever-known.</p><p>She is no stranger to change. That, after all, is the way of the night.</p><p>But <em>he</em> isn’t meant to bear any notion of inconstancy, of the swaying, oscillating tides that govern her and her people.</p><p>Prince Zuko is born of the sun; that indiscriminate, undemanding master of light. Prince Zuko is meant to be easy, reliable, compliant to the unspoken contract that Katara presents every time she finds him in the dark, places his hands where she wishes them, and rides him until they’re both spent. Prince Zuko is meant to do her bidding, has done so for the last full revolution of the moon’s glowing cycle.</p><p>Tonight, though, he seems to have other plans.</p><p>He watches her strip herself bare from the waist down as always, gaze heavy as the leggings pool at her feet and she climbs up to kneel over him. She pulls his hand, warm and willing, to her mouth, moistening his fingers with her tongue before directing them down between her legs; he knows the rhythm, the pressure that she likes now, and it only takes a few moments, a few rolls of her hips for her own body to start turning hot and fluid to his touch. As she moves, she can feel his readiness for her, hard against her thigh, but with the first brush of her fingers at his trouser ties—</p><p>The world jolts. The mattress flies up to meet her. It takes her a second to make sense of where she is, pressed face-down into his sheets... Then she feels his weight settling behind her, over her, and the deep, winding heat that she’d been seeking out flashes white and outraged through her gut.</p><p>She bucks back against him, trying to throw him off, but all he does is take advantage of the space she’s created by slipping a hand underneath them and sinking his fingers into her with galling ease; a terrible, effortless slide against the eager wetness at her core. His thumb burns on her clit, and her breath stalls as every muscle in her body seizes.</p><p>For a moment, they hold, dead-locked in this mortifying embrace and the glassy, whining thrill that it brings, that it <em>shouldn’t</em> bring.</p><p>‘If you tell me to stop, I’ll stop.’</p><p>It’s the last thing she’s expecting to hear, whispered low and grating over her shoulder. His breath on her ear makes her hips jerk against his hand, but Katara grits her teeth and refuses the cry that wells up in her throat. She will <em>not</em> cave to the whims of her body, not on his terms.</p><p>‘I know you can understand me.’</p><p>He’s looking for a response, then, some kind of acknowledgement. She huffs out a laugh, sharp through her nose, and then his free hand is winding into her hair and pulling her head around, forcing her to meet his eyes.</p><p>‘Nod for me to keep going. Tell me to stop at any point, and I’ll stop.’</p><p>Insistent. Surprising. The Sun Prince is laying down a challenge, not waging a war, and he wants her complicit. She glares at him through the dark, steels herself against the slow circling of his thumb, resolves that this sheltered boy of sunlight will not pull her to pieces tonight no matter how hard he tries... but she nods.</p><p>‘Good.’</p><p>And then he’s moving, rocking her up onto her hands and knees in front of him. His fingers curl inside her, his breath scalding on the back of her neck as he wrenches a groan from deep in her chest, a tremor from somewhere deeper still, before all at once his touch disappears from between her legs and the heat of him draws away.</p><p>Katara has the fleeting thought that this is her chance, shaky and weak-kneed as it is, to take back the upper hand; she’ll turn on him with a snarl on her lips, reclaim her seat over him, use every tool her body offers to lay waste to the soft, pampered prince beneath her. She’ll run him ragged.</p><p>But before she can rise up out of the yield that he’s twisted her into, his hands are at her hips and his cock is pressing hard and heavy against her.</p><p>A whole new sound, low and guttural, is torn from her throat as he fills her, as she clenches down on him. He lets out a grunt of his own, gives her the barest of breaths to adjust, and then dives into a pace that has her vision blinking out.</p><p>It’s new, this angle. New and strange and—</p><p>‘Fuck!’</p><p>She spasms around him, her hips pushing back against him of their own accord as he strikes that spark in her, the one that lies hidden deep behind the jut of her pelvis.</p><p>He chuckles. She wants to scream.</p><p>‘Shhh. You’ll wake up the whole palace if you keep on like that. Although I can’t complain about that being the first thing you’ve said tonight.’</p><p>His voice is far too steady for her liking, an enraging contrast to her breaths that are coming in short, sharp gasps, driven out of her by the punishing rhythm of his hips — she can feel him stoking her weaknesses with every thrust, feel that treacherous coiling in her lower belly as he ruts into her like a dog on a bitch, and she reaches behind her to scrabble at the hand that’s smoothing down her spine. It’s futile; a measly show of petulance that only tightens his hold as he pounds into her faster, deeper, shoving her forwards so that she has to drop her hand back to the mattress to steady herself.</p><p>‘You know what to say.’</p><p>Laughable, the way this son of daylight speaks. As though she really has a choice in between the belying softness of his hand on her back, and the cramping of her calves, and that spot that he <em>keeps on hitting</em> that sends her shuddering and pathetic and <em>fuck</em>, <em>spirits, this is—</em> No choice; he’s handed her a taunt dressed as a kindness, an admission of defeat that would be so much more shameful than allowing this tightening inside her to reach its inevitable end.</p><p><em>Fuck</em>, she wants the end. She’s so frantic for it that it hurts.</p><p>She despises him.</p><p>It’s come barrelling towards her so quickly, <em>too</em> quickly, her collapse at his hand. Mere minutes have passed, a few paltry turns of the clock face that adorns his wall, and already she’s right there, panting and quivering around him as he tugs again at her hair, as he wrings stark, seething desperation from her clit, as his cock and his fingers push her higher, higher, oh spirits, <em>higher</em>—</p><p>She comes with bone-cracking, breath-robbing force. A stream of broken vitriol flies free from her lips; curses to the way he’s ripped her body out of the easy harmony it usually holds with her mind. Her arms judder under her weight, kept from crumpling solely by the last shred of stubbornness that she manages to cling to under the gripping pulsation of her undoing, and her chest burns as she gasps for whatever sparse air the sweat-soaked night has to offer.</p><p>It isn’t until the last aftershocks have released her from their grip that he draws out, leaving her on all fours in the middle of the bed with her hands still fisted in his sheets. With the slowing of the blood rushing in her ears, the breeze drifting through the window to cool her skin, Katara’s granted a moment of silence, of calm. But it’s all too quickly broken by a breath of laughter from the prince behind her.</p><p>She whirls around to find him propped up on his elbows, watching her. His cock still stands hard, belligerently unspent, and there’s a smugness in the quirk of his brow that flash-freezes the hazy elasticity of her comedown into something brittle and furious; there’s no heat to this wrath, not now that she’s free of his hold and the warmth that radiates from him.</p><p>No, Katara doesn’t deal in heat.</p><p>Katara is cold and dark. She glows silver, not gold. She is a daughter of the night.</p><p>And she was made to take, not to be taken.</p><p>The prince takes a breath, as if he might be about to speak, but the sound strangles in his throat as Katara surges forwards and pushes him back against the mattress, one hand pinning a shoulder and the other wrapping around the base of his cock. She stops, then, taking in the harsh rise and fall of his chest and fixing him with a pointed stare. His hips buck up against her hand, but she just shoves him harder back into the sheets and tightens her grip on him — staunch, unmoving. It’s only after a few seconds more that understanding starts to dawn across his face: if she had to play accessory to her own defeat, then he will have to do the same.</p><p>A muscle tightens in his jaw, and for a moment Katara wonders if he might resist, might find the resolve to turn her away. But his eyes are dark and desperate, running down the length of her body to catch where she holds him captive between them, and it’s clear that this is not a battle he’s going to win.</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>His voice is coarse, eked out through teeth gritted in some attempt at control. She still doesn’t move, raising a slow brow as she stares him down, and a growl rumbles in his throat but this time his voice comes louder, needier.</p><p>‘<em>Yes.</em>’</p><p>Much better.</p><p>Her fingers trail across his chest in her wake as she slides down his body, flows southwards until she’s level with his cock that’s still held hot and slick with her cum. A quick glance up to make sure he’s watching, a smirk of warning, and then she leans in and licks a long, merciless stripe up the length of him.</p><p>A surrender leaks from his lips, a drawn-out groan that reverberates through the room and bounces off the marbled walls. Katara almost laughs as the echoes of a reply come to mind—</p><p>
  <em>Shhh. You’ll wake up the whole palace if you keep on like that.</em>
</p><p>—but he’s had his share of noise from her tonight. Besides, she has more important things to do with her mouth.</p><p>She can taste herself on him as her lips close around the head of his cock, the pulsing between her own legs intensifying again with the tang of it; her tongue swirls around him, hand stroking and twisting firmly along his length, and she presses her thighs together in an attempt to soothe the arousal that’s starting to seep out of her.</p><p>
  <em>Focus.</em>
</p><p>It’s only as she starts to sink further down, as she starts to hollow out her cheeks in deep, sucking pulls, that she feels him shift — a flick of her gaze in his direction finds him pushing up to a sit above her, face flushed and pupils blown, just starting to linger on the right side of wrecked. Then his hands come down to frame her head, fingers threading through her hair, and quick as a blink she’s off him, jolting back out of his reach.</p><p>He freezes, hands raised as if ceding a fight, and meets her glare with wide, uncertain eyes. With an imperious tilt of her chin, Katara jerks her head at him, watching as he wavers for a moment before slowly, carefully dropping his arms to twist his fingers tight into the bedsheets. The concession is clear — <em>no touching</em> — and with that she slides her hands up his legs and sets her lips back to work.</p><p>This time, she doesn’t go slow, doesn’t ease him into it. This time, she leans in and takes the full length of him in one smooth swallow, wraps him in the wet heat of her mouth before drawing back inch by pressured inch, clearing the tip of his cock only to sink back down and start all over again.</p><p>Now <em>he’s</em> the one struggling for breath, the one whose thighs are jumping under her hands as her mouth works along him, down, up, down again, taking him as deep as she can and relishing the vicious thrill of triumph that runs through her as his cock twitches against her tongue. He might have managed to bring her to pieces for a moment, yes, but now <em>she’s</em> the one taking the Sun Prince apart, bit by bit, and she plans to scatter him far enough that he’ll never be able to put himself back together again.</p><p>He’s nearly there. She can feel it.</p><p>Every move she makes now drags something new out of him, has him dancing to her touch: she trails her fingers along the inside of his thigh, and he thumps a hand that isn’t allowed to reach for her against the mattress; her tongue rubs across the sensitive underside of his cock, and he throws his head back with a groan that comes out cracked and broken; she takes him until her nose is pressed against his skin, sucking hard around him, and he lets out a muted bark of a shout as he comes, as his hips jerk and he screws his eyes shut.</p><p>His release courses brackish and bitter over her tongue, swallowed down to pool hot in her stomach. And when she’s done with him, when she’s wrung everything from him that she can and then some, Katara lets him loose and rises up onto her knees as Prince Zuko falls back to lie stretched out and exposed before her.</p><p><em>This</em> is how she likes him best — malleable, expended, painted pale and silver by the moonlight that streams through the window. But even as she thinks it, her mind flickers, unbidden, back to the knowing smoothness of his voice in her ear, the smarting pleasure-pain of his fingers in her hair, the utter, undeniable abandon of her orgasm as it crashed through her—</p><p>Something clenches low in her belly, coiling in her pelvis; she grits her teeth against it, her jaw crunching icily with the promise that a misguided moment of magnetism won’t be what remains of the prince in her mind when the sun rises and she finds her bed for the day. Staring down at him, Katara considers for a moment, eyes narrowed as she dispels that dangerous twist of desire. Then she rolls the last lingering dregs of his spend around her mouth, crawls forwards over him, and brings her lips down on his. He opens for her immediately and her tongue curls messily into him, making sure he can taste himself in her kiss — a final reminder of exactly who reduced him to this spun-out creature that lies here ruined and breathless, fragile as silk thread beneath her.</p><p>His eyes are closed when she pulls away. She leaves, pausing only to swipe her leggings from the floor on her way to the window, before he has the chance to open them.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Let me know your thoughts!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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